My friend Bruce Adolphe is a world-renowned composer. In reading through his new book, Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition, I wondered how many of his insights I’d be able to apply to my own art. I’m not a musician, after all. While I did enjoy playing the piano well into my college years, I never got good at it. The same can be said of my singing. I can carry a tune but even after singing lessons, I mostly confine my vocals to the shower.
But the book is really about the creative experience of, as Bruce puts it, “thinking in the music and thinking about the music.” That journey all artists take when we get a vision and move on to decide how that vision will be realized on the page or on the stage. There’s a section where Bruce tells how Leonard Bernstein used to lie down to work in order to more easily access the “twilight area . . . wherein fantasies occur.” Bernstein goes on to explain that if you are conscious enough to observe yourself fantasizing you can start to form that fantasy into something tangible. “You may not know what the first note is going to be,” he says, “but you have a vision of a totality.”
Of course, this is a truncated piece of a more developed point that both Bruce and Bernstein are making, but what struck me about this quote was my continuing fascination with this very blog, and to a larger…
